The growth of e-business has created a significant need to integrate legacy applications and bring them to the Internet. This is because the current trend for new applications is to embrace Web standards that simplify end user application construction and scalability. Moreover, as new applications are created, it is crucial to seamlessly integrate them with existing systems while facilitating the introduction of new business processes and paradigms.
Integrating new applications with existing applications is especially critical since industry analysts estimate that more than seventy percent of corporate data, including data highly relevant to e-commerce, lives on mainframe computers. Moreover, while many e-commerce transactions are initiated on Windows, Mac, and Linux end user platforms, using a variety of Web browsers, and go through Windows NT and Unix servers, they are ultimately completed on mainframe computers, running mainframe applications, and impacting data stored in mainframe databases.
There are e-business pressures to integrate server level applications and bring them to the Internet. However, there is no complete and easy mechanism to integrate or e-business enable the applications. Integration, whether through messaging, procedure calls, or database queries, is key to solving many of today's business problems.
Integrating legacy applications with new software is a difficult and expensive task due, in large part, to the need to customize each connection that ties together two disparate applications. There is no single mechanism to describe how one application may allow itself to be invoked by another.
One consequence is an e-commerce environment of multiple applications, developed by multiple development teams, running on different platforms, with different data types, data structures, commands, and command syntax's. This environment is stitched together with application program interfaces and connectors. Connectors are an essential part of the total application framework for e-commerce. Connectors match interface requirements of disparate applications and map between disparate interfaces.
This growing interconnection of old and new software systems and applications, has led to various middle ware applications and connector applications, interface specifications, interface definitions, and code, especially for the interconnection and interaction of markup languages (such as HTML, XML, Dynamic HTML, WML, and the like), through object oriented languages such as SmallTalk and C++, with languages of legacy application server applications (such as COBOL). These interface specifications, definitions, and code should apply across languages, tools, applications, operating systems, and networks so that an end user experiences the look, feel, and responses of a single, seamless application at her terminal. Instead, the proliferation of standards, protocols, specifications, definitions, and code, e.g., Common Object Request Broker (CORBA), Common Object Model (COM), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), SOM, ORB Plus, Object Broker, Orbix, has instead created an e-commerce “Tower of Babel.”
Examples of application integration are ubiquitous: from installing an ERP system, to updating an Operational Data Store (ODS) with IMS transactions or invoking CRM systems from MQSeries; each of these requires the same basic steps. First, a user must find the entity she wants to communicate with, then she must figure out how to invoke the entity, and finally she must provide translation from one native representation to another. Today, these steps usually require manual investigation and hand coding—and leave the developers with a rat's-nest of hard-to-maintain connections between applications.
Attempts to remedy this situation involve application program interfaces and connectors, which are frequently built on Interface Definition Languages. Interface Definition Languages are declarative, defining application program interfaces, and, in some cases, issues such as error handling. Most Interface Definition Languages are a subset of C++, and specify a component's attributes, the parent classes that it inherits from, the exceptions that it raises, the typed events that it emits, the methods its interface supports, input and output parameters, and data types. The goal of Interface Definition Languages within connectors is to enable collaboration between dissimilar applications without hard coded application program interfaces.
Ideally, the interface definition language, and the connector of which it is a part, should facilitate full run-time software application collaboration through such features as                Method invocation with strong type checking,        Run-time method invocation with greater flexibility and run time binding,        High level language binding, with the interface separated from the implementation.        An interface repository containing real time information of server functions and parameters.        
Additionally, the connector and its interface definition language, should be fast, efficient, scalable, portable, support metaclasses, support syntactic level extensions, and support semantic level extensions.